Living it up in East Africa

Just after dark last night, I arrived in Kigali, Rwanda. The bus trip from Mwanza (my last stop) was 13 hours and so I arrived a little tired. My last 4-5 days have been in Tanzania, but it is such a big country that I really only feel like I passed through it. I hope to see it properly one day.

Arusha and Mwanza, the two Tanzanian cities I stayed in, didn't offer me much to do. Arusha provides a great view of Kilimanjaro and it sounds a little dumb to say, I was surprised at how big the mountain actually is. But the city itself is very much geared towards the tourist actually visiting Kilimanjaro, leaving me a little bored. The bus ride from Mombasa to Arusha was my least enjoyable yet too. It terminated halfway along the route, dodgily and without any warning, and this was after I had patiently slept in the thing overnight, while it parked in a marketplace. In total the trip, which was cold, bumpy and painfully cramped for hours at a time, took 18 hours, but on a good day, could've easily been finished in 7-8.

Mwanza, a town on Lake Victoria, between Arusha and the Rwandan border, was a conventional stopover destination. I found a comfortable hotel and spent a few days there - catching up on sleep after the aforementioned bus ride and writing, reading, walking around, that sort of thing.

I will be in Rwanda until Saturday, at which point I head north to Uganda. The countryside here is some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. It is made up of endless hills, of varying shapes and sizes, a thousand different types of green and very alive with life.

The Tanzanian countryside was similarly impressive, especially in the north-west. From the bus window, the land was as vast as I have ever seen it so that in parts you could even see the shadows of whole clouds on the ground. Trees of endless variety, rocks from tiny to huge and vast fields characterize the countryside and like Rwanda, it is all very alive with life. Stunning for its scope too, as I watched it for hours on end and yet it the view at any point would continue for hundreds of kilometers .

On the photo front, I have very few. oops. I regularly find myself in situations where it would be obviously inappropriate or rude to pull out my camera and one thing I have learned while in Africa is that so often, the moments that would make the best shots are also the ones that are the least okay to take a photo of. I have witnessed foreigners disregard this, and seen moments or encounters totally spoiled, with some turning quite ugly.

Nevertheless, I am into the final two weeks of my trip and I don't have that much faith in my memory or ability to describe and so I will endeavor to take some more shots - even if they do just end up being of coffee cups..